I'm the founding partner of Proteus International, and author of Growing Great Employees, Being Strategic, and Leading So People Will Follow. You can follow me on Twitter @erikaandersen. My websites are erikaandersen.com, and www.proteus-international.com. I'm insatiably curious. I love figuring out how people, situations and objects work, and how they could work better: faster, smarter, deeper, with greater satisfaction, more affection, and a higher fun quotient.

Why Top Talent Leaves: Top 10 Reasons Boiled Down to 1

Eric Jackson, a fellow Forbes blogger I follow and find both funny and astute, wrote a really spot-on post last month about why top talent leaves large corporations. He offered ten reasons, all of which I agreed with – and all of which I’ve seen played out again and again, over the course of 25 years of coaching and consulting. The post was wildly popular – over 1.5 million views at this writing.

So why do we find this topic so interesting? I suspect it’s because we’re genuinely curious: What would make a very senior executive – someone who most certainly has been courted by his or her organization and then paid huge sums of money to join – decide to pack it in? Is it greed (an even richer offer down the street)? Hubris? Short attention span? Or do 1%ers actually leave jobs for the same reasons as the average Joe or Josie?

According to Jackson (and, again, I agree with him) top talent does indeed leave for the same reasons everyone else does. If I were to distill his ‘top ten reasons’ down to one, it’s this:

Top talent leave an organization when they’re badly managed and the organization is confusing and uninspiring.

About half of Eric’s ten reasons are about poor people management – either systemically, as in poor performance feedback, or individually, as in, my boss sucks. And the other half are about organizational lameness: shifting priorities, no vision, close-mindedness.

It really is that simple. Not easy, mind you, but remarkably simple. If you want to keep your best people:

1) Create an organization where those who manage others are hired for their ability to manage well, supported to get even better at managing, and held accountable and rewarded for doing so.

2) Then be clear about what you’re trying to accomplish as an organization – not only in terms of financial goals, but in a more three-dimensional way. What’s your purpose; what do you aspire to bring to the world? What kind of a culture do you want to create in order to do that? What will the organization look, feel and sound like if you’re embodying that mission and culture? How will you measure success? And then, once you’ve clarified your hoped-for future, consistently focus on keeping that vision top of mind and working together to achieve it.

I’ve worked with client organizations that do those two things, and people stay and thrive. I’ve worked with and observed client organizations that don’t – and it’s a revolving door. And that’s true at all levels – not just for “top talent.”

It’s fascinating to me: Why don’t more CEOs and their teams make sure these two things happen in their organizations? What do you think?

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“Why don’t more CEOs and their teams make sure these two things happen in their organizations?”

Because they don’t get it. They’re either ignorant of the methodology or they simply don’t care. I’ve heard manager’s (not leaders) at my place of employment state succinctly, “If they don’t like the job, they can quit. There’s a line out the door for people that do want the job.” It’s about showing up, going through the motions and going home. The less time and effort spent between showing up and going home, the better. It’s also the lack of accountability on the part of senior management to get those folks out of the management positions – but since it was the senior management that hired them, you can imagine what happens. Nothing. We’re a ‘local government’ – if we were a private business, we’d be out of business.

“Because they don’t get it” is not a logical answer. Some orgs/companies are stagnant, that’s the state of the business. Good managers will try to make this obvious and allow talent to come and go. It’s not always the managers fault. Some companies are simply better than others i.e. more growth, a more exciting industry, and opportunities. Managers are employees too. They will leave just like anyone else.

Hi Erika, I think you are absolutely right. I have seen many leaders in my past career who are very concerned about their political relationships but not concerned about customers, the “real business” outside of their office or even employees. I self was part of teams where I published books next to my job, over exceeded goals and revenue and collected several super positive feedback but had in many years not any attention by the management. I always asked myself what I could do better but after I time I realized that its not all about me, its the organisation and how it changed. Some organization have the same destiny as some business or employees, the just need a change and sometimes a flash of reality. During my career I created and supported many organisations to establish partnerships and cooperation. I have seen that most of the time -if the management or leadership is not efficient- those external strategies have no success or the people that moving the company forward get no reward for their hard work. In many of the international companies where I lead projects and ideas I recognized that probably a minimal percent of organisations have a good management and a comfortable environment. Most of leaders and management (if you go more up in the hierarchy) have no interest to talk to employees or to support good ideas. In most cases you probably get a micro management where the management changes good ideas back to their own perspective which is sometimes completely far away from what the organisation needs. I studied change management several years ago and what I learned is actually something that I haven’t’ seen in any organisation so far. For myself I develop a goal: make a difference. I’m not in people management now but in my first management role overall and I promised myself that I would like to do it different. What I have seen so far: its possible but you need the right understanding of business, people, maybe cultures and emotions. Leadership is something different than management and requires a good understanding of several areas. I think that success is a mix of creating the business, an environment, develop an organization but even more with the right team on board that gets the right level of support, attention and people development…. Daniel J. Valik

Don’t confuse a ‘leadership’ role with a ‘management’ role – It’s been my experience that those that aspire to true leadership roles are quickly found out regarding their abilities and dealt with accordingly. Those that aspire to management roles may linger for decades resulting in irrecoverable (within the foreseeable future) damage. While many management roles are dual leadership roles, its easier for a manager without leadership skills to survive in some organziations than in others. To my eye, it’s usually those same organizations that lose their mid-level leaders to competition because the organization doesn’t recognize that leadership ability or the leadership component that is required of good management.

First, great follow-up to a topic that should be addressed now more than ever. I would point out that the loose use of ‘leaders’ should be reigned in more tightly. Just because someone has people reporting to them does not make them a ‘leader’, it makes them a ‘manager’. All too often, these “managers” are promoted because they do exactly what daburb mentioned above: they put in their time, agree with their manager, and go home. Leaders always look to challenge the status quo and rarely stand still (if you are standing still, you are moving backwards a great mentor once told me). In addition, many at the C-Level fail to remember where they have come from. Most CEOs come from little or nothing and busted their hump to get where they are today. Unfortunately, they then surround themselves with cronies or consultants who don’t tell them what they need to hear. As a result, those in the “outer circle” who are delivering value to the organization and most of the time ostracized, leave. Finally, it is my experience that many of today’s so-called leaders are afraid to make a decision and learn the hard way that by not taking action they are in fact making a decision.

I really agree that courage is a key element of leadership: the courage to try new things, to be wrong, to not know, to hear the tough news, to make difficult decisions – sometimes with limited data. People really respond to courageous leaders – and the best people respond the most positively.

Working in the Org Effectiveness space, I obviously support that these things are important. However, I think once a culture is in place, it is extremely difficult to shift. A new CEO or leadership team can’t simply prioritize those things and inspire quick change in “culture” – which is fundamentally a composition of past experiences and stories. Can they impact it – YES! But, I think it takes longer to move the needle than people want to wait out. Thus, you have a revolving door and nobody sticks around long enough to be the one(s) who see the culture shift.